THE POSITION OF SPOONS

Short essays collectively providing insights into a writer’s practice and her life as a reader.

“It’s always a pleasure,” writes three-time Booker Prize nominee Levy, “when the balance between enigma and coherence is in the right place.” Many of these disparate texts were originally published as commissioned introductions to novels or articles in journals, but together they acquire an electric energy as they begin to take the shape of an untethered, free-form autobiography. Levy writes of her teenage admiration of Colette and her first encounter with Marguerite Duras. She pens two discrete celebrations of Violette Leduc and a rhapsodic short tribute on Hope Mirrlees, whose Paris: A Poem was first published by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. She declares that the essays of Elizabeth Hardwick are “of value to anyone interested in the ways in which women are made present in literature.” And while her focus lies predominantly on under-celebrated 20th-century female artists and writers, she repeatedly strives to find something bigger than simple feminist appreciation. “It is so important,” she writes while discussing photographer Francesca Woodman, “to have a grip when we walk out of the frame of femininity into something vaguer, something more blurred.” A few texts are underdeveloped and feel as if they were limited by an arbitrary word count; others, like “The Mortality Project” and a long introduction to J.G. Ballard's novel Kingdom Come, feel like thematic outliers. Despite a few flat notes, it becomes apparent that these parts work in concert to create the vague blurriness she alludes to in her Woodman tribute. In the poem for Swiss surrealist Meret Oppenheim that gives the collection its title, she writes, “It is hard to find a form for freedom / Deep, light, unstable, ageless / Shifting, raw, slippery, lonely // But we do / We do find it.” The Position of Spoons points the way.

An elegant, minimalist collage.